When I was in high school, I had a bowl cut. If you’re not familiar with this particular brand of coif, let me describe it for you. Imagine a large, hairy mushroom being plucked from its stalk and strapped lovingly to the head of a twelve year-old boy. You might think that a chinstrap would be necessary, but by some celestial physical phenomenon,  the bowl cut perched majestically, like a chubby spire atop the Taj Mahal that was, doubtless, my body. For more on the bowl cut, see the diagram to your right.

At the time, I was working at Carowinds, a large amusement park and a quasi-sweatshop for hundreds of cash-strapped teenagers. In droves we came, waving our work permits and imagining the inevitable deluge of cold, hard cash into our meager little lives. I like to think that the general manager – a fat, sweaty man twirling a mustache and giggling diabolically – was in a very humid trailer on one of the park’s backlots, counting his money like Ebenezer Scrooge and listening to “Ramblin’ Man” by The Allman Brothers.

Carowinds straddles, quite literally, the border between North and South Carolina, and in those days, was quite a diversion for the blue collar, everyday sorts of people that that just wanted something to do with their kids other than eat at McDonald’s and go to the beach once a year. Oversized, stuffed cartoon characters, airbrush art, four-dollar Cokes, cubic tons of useless merchandise, and funnel cakes. Redneck catnip.

I was slumped against a dirty counter inside the laser tag facility where I had chosen to work that summer. It was sweltering that mid-July afternoon, and I’d just spent forty-minutes outside harassing passersby to come inside, pay us, and run around in the dark while shooting at strangers with useless toy guns. I often wondered how much fun it would be to swap out the battery-powered laser pistols with loaded shotguns. I’m pretty sales would have spiked.

Drops of sweat ran down my temples, my neck, past a blue uniformed collar, and down my chest.

What the passersby didn’t know was that no one cared about them. We didn’t earn any extra money by getting more or less people into the facility, so there was no incentive to work any harder than was necessary to make minimum wage (four-dollars-and-something at the time). Our manager, a bossy bisexual named Stacy, barked orders at us at infrequent but regular intervals, spending most of her time looking at the “books” – a simple chart that counted sales one-by-one – and pretending to have more important things to do. Stacy was a terrible boss, instilling zero respect, little fear, and instead regaling us with tales of her wide-ranging sexual exploits across the gender gap.

This was the summer that I learned to despise Californication, a seminal album by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. We had a massive collection of cd’s, brought in by one of the workers and used to pump a constant flow of music into the caverns of the laser tag arena. Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, Soundgarden, Creed, Sublime – we had it all, loud rock music designed to rile the spirits of the sweaty, sugar-packed warriors inside, earning meaningless glory on a foggy, neon field of battle. One of Carowind’s less-deserving patrons decided to pilfer our tuneage, thus leaving us with a single disc (the one still in the player) and, for the rest of the summer, a group of barely-legal workers who were too scared to bring in any of our own stuff. For the next two months, it was Red Hot Chili Peppers, all day, every day. And I mean all day. Every day.

The afternoon the old lady fell came like any other Tuesday afternoon at the park. It was hot, humid, and the smells coming from the trash cans was, quite plainly, distinct. The park’s inhabitants were in the nape of the afternoon, most of them full from the hot dogs, nachos, hamburgers, and multi-colored sodas now sloshing around in their sun-burnt bellies. It was like a theme park filled with lions stuffed from the kill. No one wants to do much from about one to two p.m.

“Fine by us,” muttered the laser tag professionals.

I was standing inside, watching a group of church youth group kids go by when it happened.

To Be Continued…